


Tip of the Tongue

by nanda (nandamai)



Category: Alias
Genre: Angst, Dysfunctional Relationships, F/M, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-06-01
Updated: 2002-06-01
Packaged: 2017-11-15 15:25:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/528736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nandamai/pseuds/nanda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even Sydney can’t take the pressure forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tip of the Tongue

**Author's Note:**

> Sydney cracks. Vaughn grows a spine, though not the way you’d expect. As promised, evil angsty smutfic. For Kat, who asked very nicely, and for Karen, who very nicely betaed.

_“I need someone in my life to be real.”_  
 _“This, right here, what we do, is real.”_  
 _“Look where we are. I mean, this isn’t real. This isn’t what we should be doing.”_  


***

She drifts through her world on autopilot. Smiles at Francie, writes a paper on Herman Melville (not Moby Dick, Billy Budd), watches Sloane when he doesn’t know she’s looking, buys groceries simply because she has to eat.

Her father stops by the house to ask if she is okay. She nods. She lies. Once, she would have been strangely glad he’d asked, sickly and childishly happy that he’d noticed.

She drinks tequila with Will (who carefully avoids asking questions). Goes to Emily’s funeral. Steals weapons and eats injera in Addis Ababa. Meets with Vaughn in the warehouse and thinks about things she shouldn’t.

“Sydney,” he says, concern in his face and in the puppy-dog eyes he always uses to see her, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” She puts on her best smile. “Just tired.”

“Maybe you should ask Sloane for a couple days off.” Carefully, cautiously, in a low voice, as he might try to approach a wild dog.

“You’re right. I think I will.”

She no longer tells him what she feels. She’s forgotten how.

Alone, in bed, she can’t make herself come.

She drinks half a bottle of her favorite Spanish red and tries again.

***

She wants what she cannot have — a normal life, a safe life, a life without lies.

Failing that, she just wants something. Needs someone. Something to be afraid of. If she can’t feel, she can feel someone moving inside her.

She drifts, and she drifts, and she wants. So, so painfully.

***

He’s different, too. Since Taipei, since the flood and the window and her mother and, oh God, the club, where he took her hand. She doesn’t want to remember that, can’t let herself remember that. Because she felt it, then, deep in her gut.

He’s been different. There’s something new in his eyes, something she tries not to see. “I think I’m jealous,” he said last week, when she described a narrow escape in Ethiopia.

He liked it. Taipei. Breaking the rules, the adrenaline rush. Death on the tip of the tongue. It’s a powerful drug, and she knows it.

His mailbox is the third in a row of six, the kind with one keyhole at the top, the easiest lock she’s ever picked. She leaves a note and tastes the danger. Friday, midnight. Club 66 in Venice.

She knows he will say yes.

***

The club is seedy, smoky, sweaty. Yet popular — pretty young things in Gap khakis and Skechers, white t-shirts and stretchy nylon tank tops. Former frat boys and sorority girls, earning money on their own for the first time in their lives and spending it on booze. Speakers blast Smashmouth at top volume. It’s the kind of place that reminds her of how not-normal her life is. The ocean is not far; she convinces herself she can smell salt.

She spots him, and she thinks this makes her feel something. Maybe it does.

He must have known the place, because he’s dressed to blend in. Looks even younger than he is, younger even, maybe, than she is. He has a beer in one hand, half drunk, something dark and thick. She imagines it will taste malty on his lips. She likes malt better than hops.

She watches him for a few moments, standing by the door. Then she walks to the other end of the bar and orders. Vodka, straight up. Stolichnaya. It seems only fitting.

He must hear her voice, maybe subconsciously, because he’s across the room and the room is loud. They’re both tall enough to see over most of the heads; he turns to her, slowly, and meets her eye. And she knows he’s here for the same reason she is.

She pays for her Stoli. Downs it, as the bartender watches, checking her out. Asks for another and pays for that, too.

Anyone could be watching, in the crowd. Anyone.

She moves towards the bathroom and knows, without looking, that he’ll follow.

***

Words that no longer have meaning:

Fear, love, hate, faith.

Mother, father, friend, lover.

Future.

Right and wrong.

***

“This is crazy,” he says, his hands already inside her shirt.

“No one followed me.” His black cotton sweater and t-shirt over his head, her fingertips on his chest.

“This is suicide.” Her back against the scratchy concrete wall, skirt hiked up around her waist. He gasps as he discovers she has nothing on underneath, spreads his fingers across her naked pelvis and touches the small hairs he finds just below.

“Doesn’t matter.” His jeans and silk boxers around his knees. He should wear jeans more often.

“No.” Leaning into her, a sick parody of a first kiss. His mouth on hers, his tongue between her teeth. Her belly hot and tight. He doesn’t taste like malt, he just tastes like beer. Doesn’t matter.

His fingers inside her are real and terrifying. His teeth on her breast, his cock thick under her hand. She wants him to tear her open, rip her insides out, find the piece of her that used to care.

Two young, female voices enter the bathroom, giggle at what they hear, and leave quickly.

“That could have been SD-6 security,” he says as his thumb presses down hard on her clitoris.

“Yes.” And she backs into the wall, arms tight against his shoulders for balance. Wraps her legs around his hips, her entire body open to him. He enters her hot and fast, plunging right into her core, touching the one spot deep inside that’s still tender.

Her heavy black shoes push at the blue metal on the other side of the toilet stall, her knees bent at an uncomfortable angle. Her tailbone hurts, the cement scrapes — she’ll have a bruise. Danny was gentle and Noah was kind (to her) and none of the others ever mattered very much. But this, this is neither gentle nor kind and oh, oh, it matters, it does.

She pulls his head to hers and sucks the air from his mouth even though she cannot breathe. His hands on her hips, holding her weight, holding her still so she cannot match his uncontrolled thrusts when he spills himself inside her. She squirms sideways, arches her back a little, and falls into him, over the edge.

His name fills her head but she will not let it pass her lips. She is very good at self-control.

She showers as soon as she gets home, not wanting to smell their sex on herself in her bed. Not wanting the ghosts of his hands to invade her dreams.

***

She is on her way to Hong Kong, and they are in the bloodmobile. She sits on the counter, swinging her legs. Pays attention to his words, accepts the gadget he offers her and a band-aid on her arm.

They don’t talk about it when they meet, never. But what they do together is more real than the warehouse, more real than the Agency, more real than the tequila and the vodka. More real than she is.

It’s easier now, to do what she has to do. Lie to her friends. Go to class. Watch Sloane. Because the ache in her thighs is real, the lingering stretch from being well and truly fucked, the scrape on her elbow from the concrete wall when he put her down and she lost her balance.

His limpid eyes, the risks he takes for her — these are almost real. Almost.

***

The garden at the Getty Center is far more risky than the club — it’s open, it’s daylight, it’s even more full of people but they’re more spread out. She is early this time, intentionally, and she waits for him by the waterfall, sniffing the azaleas. She opens a book, a cheap paperback Calvino. Pulls out her pencil, feels the sun on her face, just another student soaking up culture on a Saturday afternoon.

She senses his gaze before she sees him, standing above her, leaning over the rail and pretending to appreciate the view. Not much smog today; she’s sure he could see downtown, if he looked. She remembers the time they met at the Observatory, the clouds low and thick around them.

She puts her book in her backpack, zips it shut. Walks slowly up the path, far to his right. The handicapped bathroom in the museum is private, with its own lock, but he makes her wait, this time. Four minutes, five, six, while she paces the small space. A soft knock on the door. She turns the lock, pulls him inside, pushes him against the back of the door, hungry and desperate.

“You’re cruel,” she barely has time to say before he claims her mouth. They’re both wearing jeans today and it seems forever before they’re off their bodies and hanging on the low wall hook. They don’t bother with the shirts, it would take too long and she needs him too much. She turns and he drives into her from behind, her arms balanced on the edge of the sink, and she hits her chin on it with a sharp crack when she comes, the impact and her orgasm working together to make her feel weightless and dizzy.

***

She sits in her car, outside his apartment. Watches his shadow move across the window and wonders what it is like inside. She never tells him, never asks. But she thinks he has done the same thing, watching her when she’s not paying attention; wondering what her life looks like beyond the front gate.

***

The alley behind a bar, dangerously close to his apartment building.

A storage room at a mall in the Valley, just before closing.

Her adviser’s office at the university; he’s away at a conference, he’ll never know, and she has a key.

A bathroom at the 24-hour breakfast place on Wilshire, where the walls are made of linoleum and do not scrape her skin; he kneels on the dirty floor to go down on her, lifts one of her legs above his shoulder with a hand under her knee; and she has to cover her mouth and bite her own finger and her insides are still contracting when he stands and finally, effortlessly, slides into her.

The beach at Tujunga, both of them recognizing the cliche and what they’re doing to it, how they’re twisting it. This is not romance, though in another life, another reality, they might have wanted it to be.

She doesn’t know when she begins to see herself staring back at her from his eyes; it happens gradually, and she’s slow to notice. Green mirroring brown. It doesn’t suit him.

***

“We’re going to dinner and the new Star Wars,” Francie says, in the doorway of Sydney’s bedroom. Will stands behind her, hanging back. “Want to come?”

She looks up from her book, one of her mother’s, a first edition of Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, and twists a strand of hair with her finger. “No thanks,” she says, smiling. “Think I’m going to turn in early.”

She knows that Will is learning to recognize her lies.

***

The night is cruelly hot. Ozone in the air long after sunset, LA summer.

There’s a park near her house. She lives in a decent neighborhood; usually the only people trolling the yuccas at night are gay men looking to score. She runs, carefully watching the cars around her, but sees no evidence of Security Section. She’s gone for plenty of late-night runs in the last seven — almost eight — years; maybe they’ve stopped noticing. In any case she’s stopped caring.

He waits behind the swings. She is already a sweaty mess when he tears off her New Balance runners and her sports bra and leggings. As she reaches for him she realizes he’s dressed for running, too, and hot — must have had the same idea she did.

Grass in her hair, the smell of grass in her nose, their stomachs slick but sticky. The wet sound as he opens her up, digs into her hungrily, no foreplay this time but she’s more than ready. Hours of anticipation as she sat in her room, pretending to read, lying to her friends.

She raises her hips, puts all her weight on her shoulders and the soles of her feet. Makes him kneel upright to fuck her. His face changes as he does, his eyelids screwed up tight. The air brushes her ass and tickles her spine. Her breasts are not used to starlight. (Yes, there are stars, two of them, behind his head as he looms over her.) Her neck hurts, her nipples are painfully erect. She throws her arms over her head just as he opens his eyes to watch her. She comes with a dark shudder, before he’s finished, and he’s still watching her.

When he falls on his back beside her, on the grass, she touches his arm with one finger. Knows this is the closest they will ever get to lying in bed together. No lazy Sunday mornings, ever.

She hears the traffic on the nearby 405, hears his harsh breathing, hears footsteps and a laugh and a quiet voice saying, “Joe! Joe, c’mere, look at this!” They don’t know who they’re dealing with, don’t know how well she can hear.

She doesn’t move. Try it, she thinks. Just try. But her instincts tell her they don’t present a threat, they’re just neighborhood kids breaking curfew. And Vaughn, with the slightest twist of his wrist, has his gun out and aimed at them.

“I’m a cop,” he says. A lie, but safer than the truth.

She closes her eyes, listens to the thud, thud, thud of teenage boys running.

“They’re just kids,” she says, turning towards him, on her side.

“I know.” But he still cradles the gun in his hand. “It wasn’t about them.”

She watches him. Sits up, straddles him, and takes his cock between both of her hands. In a few minutes he’s harder than he was before and she moves above him, feeling his eyes on her skin. The night is cruelly hot and she lowers herself onto him even though it hurts, even though she’s not ready again so soon and the gun is still in his hand.

“Syd,” he whispers. “Sydney.”

***

The last day is a week later, bright and sunny, and they meet in the warehouse, a business meeting. She has been back from Lahore for three days (another narrow escape) and she’s leaving for Istanbul tonight. She already knows her countermission; they met yesterday to discuss it. So she wonders why they are here but does not ask.

His suit fits him perfectly. Just tight enough in the shoulders and hips, the trousers breaking right where they should. She prefers him in jeans, but still she thinks about breaking their unspoken rules. Take his jacket off, toss the tie aside, push him against the chain link fence. Touch him, taste him. Even here. Because the danger and his cock inside her are the only things that are real.

But then she realizes he won’t look at her, and realizes, with a sharp inward jolt, that it hurts.

“Vaughn. What’s wrong?”

He sighs, puts his hands in his pockets. “We can’t do this anymore.”

“Do what?” she asks, too stupid or too stubborn to understand what he means. They don’t talk about it, not here, not ever.

“You know what.” He rubs his forehead in that way he has, but she still wonders if he sees her. “I want you, Sydney,” he says, and she can tell through her fog that though he means it, it pains him to say it. “God help me, I want you, but this — this is not you.”

She turns her face away.

“I’ve made you an appointment with Barnett.” He holds out a small piece of paper and she can see, barely, that it is a CIA business card. With something scribbled on it in blue pen. “Thursday at noon. You’ll have to go straight from LAX when you get back from Istanbul. I’m sorry about that.”

She realizes he is rambling.

“I thought of asking you not to mention my name, but — Jesus. This is as much my fault as yours. More, because I should have known better. Say what you want.”

She nods quickly. Takes the card he’s still holding, careful not to touch his hand. “Okay,” she says, and turns to go. Click, click — the slutty heels she wore to meet him, knowing he’d notice. A game, a tease, because business meetings are — were — off limits.

“Sydney. Wait. There’s something else.” His voice is far behind her and distant. “I’ve asked for reassignment. I won’t be your handler anymore. I’ve lost my objectivity.” A small, painful laugh, deep in his throat. “Obviously.”

She feels her own throat start to close up, her lungs shrink so that she cannot breathe. She turns but he is still far away, and not moving closer. “Vaughn —”

“No. You were in no state to be making any kind of decision, and I was not thinking with my head. I should have sent you to Barnett before. The minute you left me that note. I’m sorry now that I didn’t.”

“You think this is your fault,” she says. A statement, cold and dark.

He purses his lips, not speaking. Lips that had done incredible, mind-blowing things to her. When he finally meets her eyes, even at this distance, she recognizes the expression that made her want him in the first place, that she hasn’t seen in weeks, that she doesn’t want to see, not now.

“It’s not,” she says. “It’s mine.”

“Sydney —”

“I can take care of myself, Vaughn.” And then she’s leaving, no voice or footsteps following her. Her head is heavy on her neck and the heat of a new blister assaults her toe.

She finds her car, calmly turns the key, drives and drives and drives until she runs out of gas.

The tank is below empty and she’s pulled over on the side of a badly paved road halfway between Temecula and fucking Anza-Borrego (God, where she camped with Danny) and there’s no one for miles and the sun is blinding, she doesn’t know where her sunglasses are. She’ll miss her flight to Istanbul and she doesn’t give a fuck and she doesn’t even notice she’s crying until she tastes a tear and hears herself scream.


End file.
